Let me begin this first entry by talking briefly about my motivation for
starting a new blog. For the last few months I've been involved in Ken Eustace's
course, Online Communities. It, along with recently rereading some of Bruno
Latour's writing, and thinking about how I'm going to argue the benefits of
personal devices in school, has caused me to reflect again on what learning is,
or should be. Having contemplated and explored the issue for more than three
decades you might imagine I had a clear view on what learning is; but I'm not
sure I do.
Over my teaching career the way in which I've conceptualised learning has
changed. I started my teaching career when behaviourist theory underpinned a
lot of what was good practice. Like most new teachers I embraced and tried to
apply what I was taught. By the mid-80s I'd started to understand better the
cognitivist view and my fascination with programming languages and artificial
intelligence made me quite comfortable with idea of inputs/outputs and the
analogy of the brain as a computer. Toward the end of the nineties my
understanding had moved on again and with Mark Cosgrove and Lynette Schaverien
I started to explore the idea of generative learning and a more biological
basis from which to explain how we learn. I remember at the time how the idea
of situated cognition not only affected how I saw teaching but also the nature
of Science that I taught. I don't think I'm an intellectual gadfly - we are all
shaped by the environment we inhabit and my learning journey reflects pretty
well the changing academic landscape of the times.
Now, in the second decade of the current century learning is changing
because the tools we use have changed. In his essay The Invisible College
Clay Shirky describes how chemists, communicating as a group, made progress
where the alchemists, equipped, as it were, with the same tools and background
knowledge, did not. It was communication that made the difference and today
most individuals in the developed world have never had so many ways of
communicating. Consider the options: synchronous and asynchronous
conversations; collaborative authoring tools such as shared documents and
wikis; blogs, podcasts, vodcasts and social sharing through sites such has
Flickr, YouTube and Delicious; and social networking services such as Facebook
and Google+.
I need to understand better how this world of sharing through technology
affects learning, and teaching. This blog is going to be my way of exploring
this and, hopefully, someone who reads this will post a reaction or comment to
help me on my way. Perhaps one of the most significant things I've learnt in
Online Communities is the value of authentic collaboration. I'm a strongly
introverted person and I'm not terribly good at the social but I've come to appreciate
it's value and importance. Now, to the point of the entry.
Serendipity is a valuable thing. In two days I came across, firstly, the
wonderful Conversation Prism and a really good definition of social media both by the
same author: Brian Solis. Solis defines social media in two ways. He defines it
in terms of the tools with which people share and also in terms of the
democratization of content. I think the second definition is worth repeating in
full
2 – Social Media is
the democratization of content and the understanding of the role people play in
the process of not only reading and disseminating information, but also how
they share and create content for others to participate. It is the shift from a
broadcast mechanism to a many-to-many model, rooted in a conversational format
between authors and people.
There are strong educational implications in this definition. One that
immediately springs to mind is that schools need to facilitate the
understanding of the process by young people. We already have a responsibility
for addressing online safety and issues such as cyber bullying but I don't
believe most educators fully understand the implications of democratising
content for their students. Partly, this is because many teachers are not
themselves strongly digitally networked.
The conversational format of social media has important implications for
students. The way one presents oneself on social media and the credibility of
what one says are issues we need to address for young people. What constitutes
reliable knowledge is also something to address.
I've recently begun to appreciate the role that different forms of social
media play in broadcasting information and interpreting it. Reading Ben
Scneiderman's Analyzing Social Networks with NodeXL
I was reminded how different social media tools mediate information transfer
between different sized generating and consuming communities. For example a
MMOG has both large consumer and producer populations but in a
person-to-person situation IM or personal messaging through Facebook mediates a
different communication experience.
At this point I'm left with lots of questions. How might our selection of
social media tools then affect how students learn? Does learning to use a tool
such as YouTube video sharing require different skills to effectively using a
Twitter feed? If so, how are the skills and understandings required different
and in what contexts does each tool produce the best outcome for students?
Hopefully, as I think and write about some of these issues answers will
become clearer and the issues more detailed.
